Descendants of the Sun, a South Korean TV drama featuring a romance between a soldier and a surgeon in a fictional war-torn nation, is reigniting K-drama fever across Asia. In China alone, where the program is simultaneously broadcast online, it has drawn more than 2.4 billion views on video-streaming website iQIYI since it began airing in late February.

Its fandom is mostly composed of young women who are fixated with the handsome male protagonist played by Song Joong-ki. It is reported that a jealous husband in China one night drunkenly stormed into a photography studio and demanded that the shop owner take pictures to ‘make him look like Song’.

The cult of male beauty associated with Descendants of the Sun is reminiscent of a recent trend that has been termed ‘Pan-East Asian soft masculinity’—male images that are exceptionally feminine to Western eyes. These types of images are mainly produced and circulated by the ‘Korean Wave’ and Japanese anime, comics and games (ACG) culture. It is well received by youth across most of East Asia and presents a significant response to the globally hegemonic masculine ideal based on the image of the transnational businessman.

Some claim that the success of South Korean and Japanese pop culture lies in attempts to make it mugukjeok or ‘culturally odourless’ by downplaying their national specificity. But for many others its popularity can be largely explained by its representations of Pan-East Asian soft masculinity.

Pan-East Asian soft masculinity has its roots in the Confucian tradition of scholar masculinity shared by many East Asian cultures, such as the wen (literary attainment) masculinity in China or seonbi (scholar-officials) masculinity in Korean history. The talented scholar is physically weak, delicate and handsome, with androgynous beauty. He is desirable to women by dint of his knowledge and literary gifts.

At the same time, the current popularity of these images of masculine beauty also reflects the influence of the metrosexual trend from the West. This indicates that masculinity has become increasingly pluralistic and hybridised in a rapidly globalising East Asia.

One conspicuous example of the transnational flow of male images in East Asia is the spread of otaku culture. With the international spread of anime and manga, the term otaku has entered other cultures and generated new expressions. In Chinese, the vogue word zhainan (the Chinese pronunciation of the Japanese kanji for otaku) refers to a socially awkward young man who secludes himself in his home all day, indulging in computer games, anime and geek culture.

Despite the Japanese term’s association with antisocial behaviour, more and more young men in Chinese cities identify themselves as zhainan and the term has come to indicate a desirable form of masculinity. There are Web essays on how to woo a zhainan and love stories featuring high school students and their zhainan teacher. The zhai lifestyle has even become a trend among urban youth. The popularity of zhainan in China may be explained by the discourse in premodern Chinese literature on the ‘purity’ of men who have obsessions.

Compared with zhainan, the word meng bears an even more direct link with Japanese pop culture, being the Chinese pronunciation of the Japanese character moe. Moe, which originally meant ‘budding’ or ‘burning’, now refers to a particular kind of ‘adorable’ or ‘cute’ preadolescent girl in ACG culture. Like otaku, the word has undergone transformations in meaning and usage during its migration to China.

In the Chinese context, meng, which can be used as a noun, adjective or even a verb, has become a trendy word among young people, particularly in cyberspace. It can be used to describe a wide of range of things: from children’s expressions to President Xi Jinping’s new hairstyle. Notably, it is increasingly used to describe loveliness in men. When a man is referred to as meng, there is a (positive) implication of femininity. The popularity of zhainan and meng in China, on the whole, represents a growing cultural convergence among East Asian countries.

The ‘softness’ of Pan-East Asian soft masculinity also lies in its more sensitive and caring attitude toward women. The ‘Herbivore Man’ (sōshoku danshi) in Japan and South Korea, and ‘Warm Man’ (nuan nan) in China are all in line with this type of sensitive new guy.

The term Herbivore Man and its counterpart, ‘Carnivorous Woman,’ were first coined by the Japanese author Maki Fukasawa and became known through Megumi Ushikubo’s popular book The Herbivorous Ladylike Men: A Change in Japan. This new type of man is arguably a rebellion against the ideal salaryman masculinity of postwar Japan. They are less ambitious and are ‘harmless’ for women because they always display an understanding of women and their feelings. (...)In these dramas, patriotic Chinese masculinity is portrayed against its Other, the ‘Japanese devils’. The characterisation of Japanese officers and soldiers reflects stereotypes that are deeply rooted in the collective memory and imagination of generations of Chinese, gained from popular media if not from actual experience. For instance, the cold-blooded Japanese commander predictably commits hara-kiri when ultimately faced with defeat. The Japanese officer regularly slaps his subordinates in fits of anger, with baka (Japanese for ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’) always on his lips. He also regularly mistreats women, while his submissive wife bows deeply to welcome him home every evening.

It is against these images of Japanese men that an idealised Chinese manhood is portrayed and eulogized.#Asie#modes#Masculinité

“The Sopranos” did it in 2001, when Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi was suddenly and violently raped in a parking garage. “Veronica Mars” made it part of the titular protagonist’s backstory, in the 2004 pilot. In 2006, “The Wire” introduced and then never confirmed it, when it showed us the story of Randy (Maestro Harrell) keeping watch as a girl named Tiff “fooled around” with two boys in the bathroom. “Mad Men” did it in 2008, when Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) was raped by her fiancé, Greg (Sam Page) on the floor of Don’s office.

A few shows were practically founded on it—“Law And Order: SVU,” which premiered in 1999, has dealt with rape in nearly every episode of its 16-season and counting run. “Oz,” the 1997 HBO show set in a prison, regularly featured male-on-male rape.

But starting around the turn of the decade, rape on television morphed from a delicate topic to practically de rigueur. In the last two years alone, shows as vastly different as “Downton Abbey” and “Game Of Thrones” have graphically portrayed violent rape—typically, but not always, perpetrated by men onto women—to the point that depictions of sexual assault on television have become a regular part of the national discourse. “SVU,” “Outlander,” “Broad City,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “Tyrant,” “Stalker,” “Shameless,” “Scandal,” and “House Of Cards” have all handled sexual assault, in their own way—either by depicting rape, exploring whether or not a sexual encounter is rape, or making jokes about how often rape happens. For a crime that has a dismal 2 percent conviction rate, it certainly is getting talked about an awful lot.

I can identify that this is a phenomenon that is happening. It’s a little harder to explain why. Some of it is purely a numbers game: There’s more television than ever—and more and more of that television is not on broadcast networks, with their stricter censorship rules and mandates for reaching a mainstream audience. It’s certainly easier to depict and discuss sexual assault on television now than it ever was before.

But that’s not the whole story. I joke, morbidly, that my job title has changed from television critic to “senior rape correspondent” because I cover televisual sexual assault with alarming frequency. The cases, on TV, run the gamut from 14-year-old girls drugging 18-year-old boys into having sex with them and plots attempting to reconstruct hazy memories of late-night drinking to men raping other men as an act of war and husbands raping wives in the bedroom. It’s a topic that engages, uncompromisingly, with our notions of gender, sexuality, power, and equality. And despite the barrage of sexual assaults on television, it’s a crime that occurs far, far more often in real life.

[T]he majority of men find themselves dispensable, with no meaningful role and no stake in the future. For men (unlike for women, for whom gender transformation is actively being canvassed by the international community) there is no space, other than reformist Islam, to discuss the implications, hence few alternative trajectories for men to achieve manhood.

The impact of war on Somali men, from the Rift Valley Institute, examines how 20 years of war has impacted men and ideas of masculinity in Somalia. Based on a series of interviews with both Somali men and women the report explores how ideas have changed and what this means for the future.